The Howard League for Penal Reform

The right to a fair trial

One of the fundamental rights upheld in Britain is the right to a fair trial. Jon Venables has not been found guilty of any new crime and should be treated as being innocent until it is proven otherwise. We don’t know yet whether he is even accused of a crime and if so, whether he will be charged.

I have been reluctant to comment on this issue because of the public hysteria, and I don’t believe that hyping the public debate helps to heal the grief of the family. But I was asked to go on the Moral Maze last night and these comments are based on that discussion. I was particularly struck by Mary Riddell’s contribution to the programme when she characterised “parasitic grief”, which I think seems to have invaded the media and is used to legitimise a lynch mob mentality.

Some of the questions on the show dealt with the possibility of redemption and how this one case appears to negate our attempts to turn around the lives of those who have taken a life. But of all the hundreds and hundreds of people (mostly men) who have been released from prison after serving a life sentence for murder in the past seven years, only one has been convicted of killing again. Overwhelmingly people settle back and lead crime free lives.
Our Howard League lawyers tell me that as long as his identity is protected, he is more likely to receive a fair trial. While it is true that a person’s previous convictions are disclosed in court as a matter of course, discretion is given to the court regarding the extent of the disclosure. The details of Jon Venables’ previous crime are so notorious that any jury trying him on a new matter would inevitably be prejudiced if they knew of his true identity. Divulging Jon Venables’ identity would not be in the interests of justice as there is a danger that he might then become untriable.
Dame Butler-Sloss took the unusual step of granting Jon Venables anonymity in 2001, not only because of his age but also because there was the genuine fear for his life following threats from members of the public. The state has a duty of care to everyone, regardless of who they are, and as a result the government are obliged to protect Jon Venables’ identity if they deem that necessary in order to protect his life. There is also the cost to the public purse argument. It will cost more for the public to protect Jon Venables if his identity was known and he was returned to prison than it would to preserve anonymity in the first instance.

March 11, 2010   Posted in: Government policy, Headline grabbing, Uncategorized  No Comments

Less crime, safer communities, fewer people in prison

We have launched our new campaign, which you can find by visiting our website.  Please take two minutes to take action for the Howard League and help us put penal reform at the top of the political agenda during the general election and beyond.

March 5, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Campaigns, Children and young people, Government policy, Howard League, Overcrowding, Prisons, Public Services, Rehabilitation, Sentencing, Victims  No Comments

No discernable progress

I thought readers of this blog would be interested in some highlights (or lowlights indeed) on how children and young adults are treated in the prison system, according to the latest annual report of the Chief Inspector of Prisons:

Children

Although there has been a drop in overall numbers, the number of children serving long term sentences is increasing.

‘All segregation units in the male estate have been rebadged as ‘care and separation’, ‘reorientation’ or ‘intensive supervision’ units. However, they continued to operate as traditional segregation units, with the emphasis on separation rather than care’.

‘All young men continue to be strip-searched on arrival and as part of other routine procedures. We have still found strip-searching under restraint, even for those at risk of self-harm, in both male and female units’.

‘The fundamental problem was the size and design of establishments and units’.

‘Distance from home remained a major problem’.

‘More than one in four young people had felt unsafe at some time. Those most likely to feel unsafe were in larger split sites rather than smaller dedicated units’.

‘Safeguarding procedures remained fractured at most establishments. Vulnerability assessments were generally not good enough and none of the establishments inspected had a clear strategy or coordinated system of care planning to identify, assess and meet the needs of the most vulnerable or challenging young people’.

‘None of the male establishments inspected had a comprehensive and fully implemented behaviour management policy’.

Progress in the children’s estate – highlights the reduction in the population and ‘the excellent Keppel Unit for some of the most disturbed boys’ as examples of progress and good practice.

Young adults

There has been ‘no discernable progress for young adults in prison’. Anne Owers concludes that ‘This is still a neglected and under-resourced age-group. Busy and overcrowded local prisons struggle to deal with their specific needs, and even specialist young offender institutions lack the resources, support and training to do so. The high rate of reoffending among young adult men is unlikely to reduce without significant changes in approach, funding and focus’.

‘In general, relationships with staff were distant, and staff had low expectations of prisoners and limited engagement with them’.

‘Conditions and regimes for young adults held in adult establishments remained unsatisfactory’.

‘Young adults were less positive about safety and respect than adult prisoners: a third felt unsafe, only half felt well-treated by staff and nearly half said they had been threatened by other prisoners’.

‘In adult training prisons, strategies for young adults were underdeveloped, despite evidence that this group of prisoners was proving problematic. Young adults were disproportionately involved in use of force incidents. Equally, time out of cell was inadequate and in general worse than that of adult prisoners, with evidence of regime slippage’.

Even in dedicated sites there were problems – of particular concern is that use of force levels remain high with dramatic increases at some establishments. At Aylesbury, incidents using the use of force had increase by about 60% since the last inspection.

February 24, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Inside prisons, Prisons, Uncategorized  No Comments

Children’s prison to close

Castington prison for children is to close - fantastic news. One down, quite a lot more to go. Castington, in Northumberland, is hundreds of miles away from the homes of many of the young people incarcerated within its bleak walls. I visited a few years ago and found lads from inner city London, bemused and confused, as they might as well have been held on the moon for all they knew. They had been transported up in “sweat boxes”, ghosted out of Feltham, some of the black boys alleging it was an additional punishment to be sent to an institution with an all white staff.

It is being closed because the number of children being sent to prison has fallen and there are empty places. The number of children first time entrants to the criminal justice system has dropped, probably in part because of the relaxation of police targets that meant children throwing snow balls were arrested because they were easier to catch than professional burglars. Lower crime rates amongst children, improved support for children in trouble and reduced use of custody means that we are all beneficiaries.

The YJB’s decision to close it also complies with its stated policy of phasing out the split site prisons that hold children and young adults. Cross deployment of staff from the young adult wing is impossible to prevent, and those staff are not trained or skilled in dealing with the challenges of children. So closure of this prison for children is most welcome.

February 23, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Children and young people  One Comment

End of prisoner early release scheme announced

Ending this early release scheme is a welcome step, as the scheme did nothing to increase public confidence in the justice system. Nevertheless, the scheme was originally introduced for the very good reason that our prison system was full to capacity.  Even with the scheme in place prison overcrowding remained at crisis levels and now that it has been scrapped we can expect very serious problems to start mounting again.

The government must come up with a credible strategy to manage the prison population and reduce the unnecessary use of imprisonment. With public finances facing serious tightening in the coming years, it is time we had a grown up debate in this country about the purposes and limits of our prison system.

February 22, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Government policy  No Comments

Youth sentencing

The Prison Reform Trust has published statistics showing variation in the use of prison custody between youth courts across the country. Courts such as Bridgend, Rotherham (maybe it is to do with the food? remember that was Jamie Oliver’s shock horror television programme), Derby and Wolverhampton. The custody rates are not related to crime rates, but appear to be linked to culture and habit, with the consequence that justice is uneven and capricious.

There is quite a complicated back story to this and if we are to deal with such disparities we need to understand what is happening. Some local authorities work closely with police and magistrates to ensure that children at risk of offending, often the children most in need of protection, are provided with appropriate individual support. When this happens as a consistent policy, there are fewer children committing crimes and fewer children brought before the courts. It might then be the case that the very few who go to court have committed the more serious crimes and are older teenagers. I don’t think this is the case in the towns identified by PRT but it is a phenomenon in some areas.

But the more worrying issue is the link with poor children’s services and high custody rates. When children are failed by their parents – we are not talking here about only being fed take-aways, but serious physical violence, neglect and sexual abuse, and the only other option available is intervention by the local authority, it is incumbent on that authority to act as a good parent. Too often, they fail the children too. Then we all suffer the consequences of a child out of control, angry and anti-social.

February 16, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Children and young people, Sentencing, Uncategorized  One Comment

Rape is rape, wherever and whenever

Apparently most people think that in some circumstances rape victims should accept responsibility for being attacked. This raises some interesting questions about our attitudes to victims and crime. 

The law punishes a perpetrator of a fraud against an employer with additional severity because it is a breach of trust. Yet, when a woman is raped by a friend in his or her own home, it appears that the majority of the public considers her to be complicit, even culpable.

Our view of victims is often confused. I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago when Jack Straw refused to recognise that a child who had suffered serious violence and abuse for years and subsequently committed offences could be considered to have been a victim. 

We excuse violence at our peril, particularly violence against vulnerable people or children. We send thousands of children to prison every year for committing offences against property and leave them to experience bullying by other prisoners and violence by staff to get compliance. We are then surprised when these teenagers come out of prison and act out the very violence they have experienced in the institution we decided should be there to correct them.

The government has launched a £2 million campaign today aimed at influencing young boys not to use violence towards their girlfriends. NSPCC found that two thirds of young girls had been pressed into sexual acts they didn’t want to do, and a quarter had been the victims of violence at the hands of their boyfriends.

The campaign (with a paltry sum behind it) must influence attitudes of the young so that boys don’t hit or rape their girlfriends, and in order to do this, we all have to understand that rape is rape, wherever and whenever.

February 15, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments

Lap dancing clubs and local powers

New powers for local authorities to refuse permission for a lap dancing club will be introduced in April. I think this is a welcome move for several reasons. I agree with Harriet Harman that local people should be able to decide for themselves if they want a sleazy club in the neighbourhood. It should be a local decision to refuse permission for a sex encounter place, near a school or in a shopping area. The point now is that the decision making process has been transferred from a highly centralised system down to local people and that is a good thing. 

I am not going to get into a rant about the exploitation, abuse and objectification of young women who work in these places. However these establishments will now be classed as providing a sexual encounter, which is at least honest. The people working in them are sex workers, the people owning them are purveyors of sex for profit, and the people who don’t want them in their area should be able to say so.

As a locally elected councillor I sat on the planning committee for eight years, and it is extraordinarily difficult to take into account local issues in deciding planning applications. The law is highly constricting.

The Ministry of Justice is currently scouring the country for possible sites for huge new prisons. It has submitted a planning application for a 1,500 bed prison in Runwell, Chelmsford, last month. The local people will have little say in whether they want this monstrous prison on their doorstep. They won’t be able to refuse on the grounds that it will incarcerate men from all over the country who will then be spat out onto their streets with a handful of pound coins and a plastic bag and head straight off to the local pub or drug dealer. They won’t be able to refuse to have a prison that will see suicides and murders, violence and drug dealing. They won’t be able to refuse to spend their taxes on a burgeoning prison system that wastes public money on an unimaginable scale. And, they won’t be able to suggest other ways of dealing with local people who commit offences, for example by investing in neighbourhood alcohol or drug or mental health services.

The Howard League’s Commission on English Prisons Today suggested a significant shift towards localism in the penal system, and this should also include a review of planning law so that local authorities, and local people, can make decisions about their communities.

February 12, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Government policy, Prisons  No Comments

Amnesty and platform sharing

Amnesty International is suffering some bad publicity because one of its staff has been suspended. She appears to be claiming that the organisation (don’t forget, Amnesty is not a charity) is linked too closely to a group called Cageprisoners, one of whose principal spokespeople is Moazzam Begg.  I don’t know if this is the case, but the controversy does illustrate the pitfalls for voluntary organisations when they allow themselves to be too closely identified with another organisation or individual.

I used to work at Amnesty British Section, and at that time there was an absolute rule that it did not “share a platform” with other organisations. This used to cause all sorts of challenges as I was responsible for working with politicians and celebrities, and we had to make it clear in public that these individuals were supporting Amnesty but the organisation was not supporting them.

Today, the Howard League is going to approach celebrities to support our work and the same sort of issues have arisen. If we ask a well known actor or television personality to front a campaign for us, what happens if they are arrested for a nasty offence, or are caught in delicto flagrante? I am quite relaxed about this because we work all the time with people who may have failings – some quite challenging – but it does not mean that we ignore what they have done or implicitly condone it. We simply recognise the “crooked timber of humanity”, as Kant would say.

Some years ago we invited a well known peer to come and speak to a conference about education in prisons and it caused quite a furore. But, we have always invited former prisoners, prison governors and others closely involved with the penal system to speak at our events. This does not mean we condone their actions but their experience can shine a light on a closed institution and we should listen to people who have something useful to contribute. Being hard headed about it, a high profile former prisoner gets a bigger audience, more media coverage and a more intense public debate. 

We could, of course, only invite “perfect victims” to speak and if we could find the perfect politician we could invite him or her. Our job is to stimulate discussion, test ideas and press for improvements. One way of doing this is to work with a very wide range of people and organisations.

Having said that, I am still cautious about the sharing of platform issue. The Howard League is rightly cautious about working with other organisations and when, after careful consideration, we join coalitions we are transparent about the decision and the list is on our website. When we work with other groups, coalitions or individuals it means that we share many aims, but it does not mean that we support everything they do. We review these alliances and if it happens that our objectives diverge irreconcilably then the Howard League will leave.

February 11, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  One Comment

We should not conduct torture nor should we be complicit

The foreign secretary has lost an appeal court bid to stop the disclosure of secret information relating to the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed. This was a clash of rival principles, state security against the protection of human rights and prevention of torture.

In 2003 the UK signed up to the optional protocol to the United Nations convention on the prevention of torture that established a sub-committee with the right to enter any place of detention and examine the treatment of people held there. We should be proud that the UK was one of the first nations to sign the protocol and has by far the most comprehensive and sophisticated apparatus for carrying out its own independent investigations into places of detention.

So it is unseemly that the government is so resistant to admitting when things have gone wrong.

Mr Mohamed was held in Pakistan, at the behest of the US authorities and tortured, with the implicit collusion of UK officials. As anyone involved in the criminal justice process knows, the first step towards rehabilitation is admitting your guilt. Our government should admit its wrong doing and ensure that this never happens again, inside our borders or when we have any responsibility. 

The government should do all it can to encourage other states to sign and adhere to the optional protocol. The United States is notable in refusing to sign up to many of the human rights protocols (the two countries not signed up to the convention of rights of the child are US and Somalia) and this seems to be an opportune moment to pile on the pressure.

We should not conduct torture nor should we be complicit.

February 10, 2010  Tags:   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments